How do I convert a cURL command to Python requests?

Paste your cURL command into the input box. The tool parses it and generates equivalent Python code using the requests library, including headers dict, JSON body, and authentication.

Does the converter handle JSON bodies correctly?

Yes. When the Content-Type header is application/json or the body starts with { or [, the converter uses the json= parameter in requests to automatically serialize the data, which is the idiomatic Python approach.

How is basic auth converted to Python?

A cURL -u username:password flag is converted to auth=("username", "password") in the requests call — the idiomatic way to pass HTTP Basic Auth in the Python requests library.

Is my API data safe when using this tool?

Yes. All parsing and code generation runs entirely in your browser. No cURL commands, URLs, headers, or authentication tokens are sent to any server.

cURL to Python — Convert to Requests Code

You have a working cURL command from API documentation or your browser’s DevTools Network tab and need to call the same endpoint from Python. Translating headers, body, and authentication flags into idiomatic Python is repetitive work. This converter does it instantly — paste the cURL command and get clean Python code using the requests library.

Why Python requests?

The requests library is the de facto standard for HTTP in Python. It provides a clean, intuitive API that abstracts away the complexity of Python’s built-in urllib. With over 50 million monthly downloads on PyPI, it is installed in virtually every Python environment and accepted as the idiomatic choice for API interactions in scripts, data pipelines, and web scrapers.

Install it with:

pip install requests

How the Conversion Maps curl to Python

cURL flag	Python requests equivalent
`-X POST`	`requests.post(...)`
`-H "Content-Type: application/json"`	`headers={"Content-Type": "application/json"}`
`-d '{"key":"value"}'`	`json=json.loads('{"key":"value"}')`
`-u user:pass`	`auth=("user", "pass")`
`-b "session=abc"`	`cookies={"Cookie": "session=abc"}`
`-k` / `--insecure`	`verify=False`
`-L` / `--location`	handled automatically by requests

JSON body detection is automatic: if your cURL command’s body starts with { or [, or if the Content-Type header is application/json, the converter uses the json= parameter instead of data=. This tells requests to serialize the dict and set the correct content type header automatically.

Handling Authentication

Basic auth — The -u user:password flag becomes auth=("user", "password"). The requests library encodes this as a base64 Authorization header automatically.

Bearer tokens — Authorization headers passed via -H "Authorization: Bearer TOKEN" are included in the headers dict as-is.

API keys in headers — Any -H "X-API-Key: secret" flag is preserved in the generated headers dict.

Sessions for Multiple Requests

The generated code makes a single request. If you need to make multiple requests to the same API — for example, to maintain a login session or reuse connection pooling — switch the output to use a Session object:

session = requests.Session()
session.headers.update(headers)
response = session.get("https://api.example.com/data")

Sessions also persist cookies across requests automatically, which is useful for scraping or authenticated multi-step flows.

Handling the Response

The generated code prints response.status_code and response.text. For JSON APIs, use response.json() to parse directly into a Python dict:

data = response.json()
print(data["key"])

Always check response.raise_for_status() in production code to raise an exception automatically on 4xx and 5xx responses.

SSL and Proxies

If your cURL command uses -k or --insecure, the Python output sets verify=False with a warning comment. Disable SSL verification only for development against self-signed certificates — never in production. For production, pass verify="/path/to/ca-bundle.crt" to use a custom certificate authority.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my Python code get a different response than curl? The most common cause is a missing or mismatched User-Agent header. APIs sometimes serve different content to known scraper agents. Set headers={"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 ..."} to mimic a browser if needed.

How do I handle rate limiting in the generated code? Add a time.sleep() between requests and check for response.status_code == 429. Use the Retry-After response header value as the sleep duration if the API provides it.

Can I use the output with httpx instead of requests? The httpx library has a largely compatible API. Replace import requests with import httpx and requests.get(...) with httpx.get(...). The named parameters (headers=, json=, auth=) work identically in most cases.

cURL to Python Converter